Buying more disc storage may solve your immediate problem. However it is not a viable long-term solution. Problems can arise with:

Hardware and system migration

A UK telecoms company had an 8TB database. They wanted to refresh hardware and move from Informix to Oracle. To move 8TB of data would take four to five days. This was not feasible as the business could not be down for that long. By archiving they drastically reduced the database down to about 3TB.

Data recovery

Large databases are also problematic for data recovery. We have worked with a customer who had 27TB of data in Oracle. To recover their data would take an estimated 3.5 days – which is totally unacceptable for a 24/7 operation.